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Leslie Adelson
Department of German Studies, Cornell University "The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration" Thursday, 2 March 2006 5:00 p.m. 206 Ingraham Hall Sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies The Center for European Studies and the Mellon Workshop "Cosmopolitan Cultures, Cosmopolitan Histories" Leslie A. Adelson is Professor of German Studies and Graduate Field Member of Comparative Literature, Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Jewish Studies at Cornell University, where she has chaired the Department of German Studies since 1999. Author of Crisis of Subjectivity (1984) and Making Bodies, Making History (1993), she edited and translated Zafer Senocak's Atlas of a Tropical Germany (2000) and additionally edited The Cultural After-Life of East Germany: New Transnational Perspectives (2002). Her most recent book, on which the lecture is based, appeared with Palgrave Macmillan as The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (2005).
About the lecture: "Between two worlds is the rhetorical conceit most often conjured to situate migrants and the cultures they produce or inspire. As part and parcel of a core cultural fable for the age of globalization, it marks an imagined encounter with the material history of modern migration. Because it suggests that worlds remain stable while unstable migrants move uncertainly between them, however, this explanatory model does more to assuage anxieties about worlds, nations, and networks in flux than it does to grasp the cultural innovations that migration engenders. Breaking ranks with the language of identity, origin, and loss that underwrites this model in the popular imagination and across academic disciplines, The Turkish Turn begins to articulate a new critical grammar for understanding the cultural effects of migraiton at a pivotal and still inadequately charted moment in German culture and transnational modernities. If the literature of migration is no longer situated in any predictable sense between two worlds, then where might it be located, and what is it doing there? The lecture on the Turkish turn in German literature begins with some methodological reflections and then concentrates on an innovative short story written by Emine Sevgi Özdamar at the century's end." |